Hurricane Harvey

[Linguofreak]

And by the way this "hoarding" you guys are referring to is due to people stockpiling gasoline in order to power their generators. Its getting hot and elderly people require electricity for Air conditioning and whatnot. Electricity is required for power tools and the such. Some peoples job it is to be the "Go for" to top off fuel tanks for multiple generators for multiple people. Your average personal generator only holds around 2-5 gals of fuel and running 24 hours 24/7 you can imagine there is a need to re-fuel constantly. When you mow your yard how often do you have to refuel your lawnmower? A generator motor is nothing more than a glorified lawn mower engine if you think about it. The bigger diesel engine generators also require refueling. So its not just gasoline they are using. pumps,power tools,heavy equipment,light towers,generators,etc etc all need fuel. Its not uncommon at all to have one person tasked with "refueling" many different things for many people.

That may be the case in Houston and other coastal areas directly affected, but the gas panic I was talking about is up in DFW. We're 300 mi inland and 600 feet up, and our power grid is intact, so we're not seeing large amounts of gas usage for generators. People are buying more gas than they actually need because they're panicked that there won't be enough to go around, and as a result, there's not enough to go around (though the panic does seem to have subsided in the pay few days, and the really high prices seem to have been rarer than first reports indicated).

 

[Thunder Chicken]

[ame="https://twitter.com/Tungsten_Flight/status/903109774560112641"]Royce Renfrew on Twitter: "And for those who pointed out the incorrect Latin Grammar 🙀, in the previous version, thanks! aqua is now aquam ✅ 😉 https://t.co/9t6kJPUjR1"[/ame]

 

[Graham2001]

Yes, rumors may have been as detrimental as anything real that happened.

Local officials had to remind citizens practically hourly that the water was NOT being shut off because certain social media pages kept parroting the paranoid.
Then there's the claim of "looting is coming to your neighborhood, get your guns!" which is rather hard to deal with.
And the gas shortage rumors outside Houston leading to actual gas shortages.

And the conspiracy claims can be very dangerous, this quote comes from a podcast dealing with the hosts experience during the Colorado floods back in 2013:

When we got to September 14, Saturday, and the National Guard showed up with in seven covered personnel carriers, things got a bit more crazy. When the housemates announced, "The Storm Troopers are here!", I decided to do this episode.

The so-called "Storm Troopers" made it across the river via the very temporary bridge that some folks up here had managed to build with help from a nearby quarry. As soon as they made it across, one of the housemates went to his room and came back with a 45 pistol on his belt, arms crossed.

...

I told him to warn me because I was going to hide in a closet -- blood stains are hard to get out of clothing.

On Sunday the 15th, a National Guard person actually did come to our door, in the rain; I'm not quite sure why it took them an extra day to go door-to-door. One of the housemates, the one who actually owned the house, met him. He said there was just him in the house, ... The other housemate later thanked the owner for saying it was only him because that way when they came to forcefully remove us, they would only think there was one person.

(Note: According to the host of the podcast there were three people in the house, himself, the person who told the National Guard only one person lived there and the guy who was pleased that the National Guard had been told only one person lived there.)

Transcript: http://podcast.sjrdesign.net/shownotes_087.php

Why is this dangerous, well, if it did come to a mandatory evacuation, I would suspect the transport used would be tailored to however many people the National Guard believed were resident.